Salvador Dali's Watercolour Paintings of Original Fruit Studies to be Sold

5/18/2013

TWO OF SALVADOR DALI'S WATERCOLOUR FRUIT STUDIES

If you first look at the paintings above, you would swear they look like the familiar 19th century botanical lithographs. However a closer inspection, and you notice there is a plum that appears to be running away, the raspberries look embarrassed and the grapefruit … well, what is going on here? the viewer has to ask.

The 14 original watercolour fruit studies are in fact by the surrealist artist Salvador Dali and are remarkable because they have remained more or less hidden since 1969, since the year of their creation.

William O'Reilly, the director of impressionist and modern art at Bonhams, London, at the auction house, announced their sale recently. "One reason being they are so fresh and are absolutely unseen." They were commissioned in 1969 by the publisher Jean-Paul Schneider and then became a series of lithographs. The publisher kept the originals until they were sold in the year 2000 to an unnamed European collector, who is now putting them on the market for sale again.

The works have names such as Hasty Plum, Raspberry Blush, Wild Blackberries and Erotic Grapefruit, which includes a leaf falling backwards as it is drenched by a shower of juice. Personally I think they are absolutely delightful. Salvador Dali was a prolific artist in his time, and was very diverse in painting in various mediums and styles. Each painting is valued at 40,000-70,000 thousand pounds with the series expected to make close to one million. O'Reilly said the paintings shone a light on the artist's hyper-fertile imagination, but said they were subversive and ahead of their time as well as entertaining.

Clearly with this work, Dali is inspired by the genuine 19th-century botanical lithographs and paintings done in a similar way by the Chapman Brothers, who were known to take real Goya prints and embellish them, in a similar fashion to Dali's paintings.

The works will be sold in the middle of next month in June 2013. In another post further on, I will display some of the other paintings that are part of this set.

Andrew Ioannidis

3 Comments

Steven Timmons

5/18/2013 12:08:48 am

Don't know how that genius Dali makes the fruit come to life like that. Very well written.

philos

7/31/2013 11:01:02 pm

Yes, indeed, these paintings by Dali owe much directly to the 19th century tradition of hand-colored lithographs of fruit, which clearly inspired them, and, certainly, Dali’s color palette and the medium in which he works here recall those hand-colored lithographs faithfully. However, to truly understand the freshness of Dali’s subject matter and the peculiar oneiric sensibility of strangeness and estrangement he brings to the canvass in these work and in his other works, one should consider how steeped in the paintings of the inveterate Spanish tradition of still lifes he was and, in particular, how steeped he was in the works of Zurbarán, Velázquez, and Goya, whose still lifes possess that peculiar quality of so many Spanish still-life paintings from the Renaissance onwards that makes inanimate objects, whether they be fruit, cuts of butchered meat, flowers, fish, or everyday common-place objects, come surprisingly alive, where the inanimate object becomes animated with spirit and takes on a secret life of its own that is more than the sum of its mute quiddity. There is always a bizarre surrealist element in these paintings. Dali should be thought of less as the inventor of (a Spanish form of) Surrealism and, instead, should be considered, in one regard, as the culmination of the still-life genre artistic in a Spanish tradition that stretches all the way back to the Renaissance.
Dali was also very much influenced by the fruit, vegetable, flower, fish, or book still-life studies of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the 16th-century Italian Mannerist whose works he knew very well. Arcimbolo’s works are surrealist portraiture. However, unlike the Spanish tradition of still lifes, he doesn’t necessarily bring to life whatever his still life is study of, whether it’s fruit, vegetables, fish or flowers. Instead, he turns the portraiture made up of these fruits, vegetable or inanimate matter, literally before our eyes, into a composite human being. He anthropomorphizes the still life not by making the object of its study human-like but by literally creating humans out of fruit or whatever thing is the object of his still-life study before our very eyes. This is very different to the Spanish tradition and to Dali’s own modus operandi, and Arcimboldo is in that sense sui generis, but his is part of that great legacy of the mannerist and surrealist tradition, of which Dali is a also part, and this tradition stretches back to those Renaissance artists who were never quite content with the quotidian reality of things and felt that things themselves were as human as humans, that there was always an immanence behind every immobile thing. This seems to me to be the disturbing quality of surrealist art and even mannerist art. Both art forms create painterly worlds against which the “dead” non-human real is measured and is found to be an alarming full of life, a quality that, is paradoxically, supposed to be the defining feature of the human/animal world. Surrealism, particularly, disturbs us because it decenter us from our locus of complacency in the human world and plunges us into the oneiric world reality of the hidden life of non-animated things, all of which that take on a life of their own both figuratively and, even more importantly, literally, in art.
Finally, as to how Dali manages to get his fruit so “athletic” looking, both in form an movement, we would do well to recall that apart from being a painter, Dali was also a sculptor, a photographer, and, most importantly, he had collaborated with other great artists in film; he had made serious study of the human anatomy for artistic purposes as a painter, but the twentieth-century medium of film enabled him to see and understant the human form from multiple perspectives, and particularly from the perspective of movement, rather than just from the motionless, three-dimensional, at best, perspective of the painter. He was, also, like all great innovative artists, deeply steeped in the traditions he continued and superseded, and he had the full Renaissance painter’s understanding of human form in repose and in motion, which was also bolstered by a twentieth-century comprehension of the human form in repose and motion as understood through sculpture, photography, and film. Finally, his ability to make his fruit look athletic and human and to move like humans owes much to the legacy and continuance of the Renaissance’s complete immersion in the body as the focal point of all art.

philos

8/6/2013 10:41:13 pm

Some more thoughts on the topic of still-lifes:

I only just got the joke behind Dali's running fruit and fruit in motion; it's a play on still-life. :D

I was thinking about what makes for a good still-life, and it seems to me that the basic criterion and, in fact, the only sufficient one, is that the still-life must always suggest more than the static reality of its subject matter; it must always go beyond realism. In other words, in order for a still-life to be "successful" as art, in order for it to be more that photographic pictorialism, it must have a surreal element. If one looks back at all the still-lifes we admire, even the most realistic, even those whose express purpose is to capture the quiddity of objects, they all take the real and make it unreal, disturbingly so in the best manner of the disturbing quality of surrealist art. Objects, literally, come alive by become estranged from their mundaneness. They take on a life of their own, and the paradox of this draws attention to what art can do in its ability deny the oblivion of all things as they get swallowed in the flux of time and like all lives, even still ones, are, therefore, forgotten. In this sense, objects are liberated into the life of the art work itself, and this rescues them from a "still-life" and brings them into the life of art with all its vibrancy, vivacity, and distinctively human personality, and, of course, with all its resistance of death and persistence in the face of death. I see these qualities very much in your still-lifes, which are among my most favorite of your paintings. Can you somehow discuss this surrealist quality of estrangement and whether you are conscious of it as you paint these objects?

If you could post your still-lifes in the blog section, I would love to comment on them. Thanks.

Salvador Dali's Watercolour Paintings of Original Fruit Studies to be Sold

TWO OF SALVADOR DALI'S WATERCOLOUR FRUIT STUDIES

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